A Guide to the Best of Contemporary Animation
Th e Continuum International Publishing Group Inc 80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038
Th e Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd Th e Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX www.continuumbooks.com
Copyright © 2010 by Chris Robinson
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers.
Adobe Flash® and Maya® are registered trademarks. Th e term ‘Flash animation’ refers to animation created using Adobe Flash®.
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Robinson, Chris, 1967-
Animators Unearthed : A Guide to the Best of Contemporary Animation / by Chris Robinson.
p. cm.
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 8264- 2956- 8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN- 10: 0- 8264- 2956- 4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Animated fi lms—History and criticism. 2. Animators. I. Title.
NC1765.R619 2010
791.43’340922—dc22 2009053738 ISBN: 978- 0- 8264- 2956- 8
Typeset by Pindar NZ, Auckland, New Zealand Printed and bound in the United States of America
vii
Illustrations ix Introduction 1
Chapter 1 Skip Battaglia: Skip Man Motion 11
Chapter 2 Aaron Augenblick: Last Exit to Brooklyn 23
Chapter 3 Chris Landreth’s Psychorealism 33
Chapter 4 JibJab: Redefi ning the Toon 47
Chapter 5 PES Play 57
Chapter 6 Patrick Smith’s Twisted Catastrophes 71
Chapter 7 Visions of Joanna Priestley 81
Chapter 8 Barry Purves: Th e Puppetmaster 93
Chapter 9 Michaela Pavlátová’s Carnal Carnival 107
Chapter 10 Th éodore Ushev: Man Called Aerodynamics 119
Chapter 11 Bob Sabiston: Th e Unanimator 133
Chapter 12 Bruce Alcock: Th e Storyteller 147
Chapter 13 Th e Tricks, Flies and Timing of Konstantin
Bronzit 157
Chapter 14 Suzan Pitt: Dollhouses, Magic and Sexy
Chapter 15 In the Dust and Moonlight of Don
Hertzfeldt 179
Chapter 16 Chris Shepherd: Who He Is and What He
Wants 191
Chapter 17 Run Wrake Ain’t No Meathead 199
Chapter 18 Th e Dreamworlds of Mait Laas 209
Chapter 19 John Canemaker: Confessions of an
Animator 217
Chapter 20 Joanna Quinn: Beryl, Britannia and
Bum- Wiping Bears 229
ix
1 Skip Battaglia: Skip Man Motion
Figure 1.1 Skip Battaglia 10 Figure 1.2 Second Nature 10 Figure 1.3 Restlessness 10 2 Aaron Augenblick: Last Exit to Brooklyn
Figure 2.1 Aaron Augenblick 22 Figure 2.2 Drunky 22 Figure 2.3 Plugs McGinniss 22 3 Chris Landreth’s Psychorealism
Figure 3.1 Chris Landreth 32 Figure 3.2 Ryan 1 32 Figure 3.3 Ryan 2 32 4 JibJab: Redefi ning the Toon
Figure 4.1 Evan and Greg Spiridellis 46 Figure 4.2 JibJab: Th e Early Years 46
Figure 4.3 JibJab: Th is Land 46
5 PES Play
Figure 5.1 PES on set of Sprint shoot 56 Figure 5.2 Th e Fireplace 56
6 Patrick Smith’s Twisted Catastrophes
Figure 6.1 Patrick Smith 70 Figure 6.2 Delivery 70 Figure 6.3 Handshake 70 7 Visions of Joanna Priestley
Figure 7.1 Joanna Priestley 80 Figure 7.2 Dew 80 Figure 7.3 Voices 80 8 Barry Purves: Th e Puppetmaster
Figure 8.1 Barry Purves 92 Figure 8.2 Gilbert and Sullivan 92 Figure 8.3 Achilles 92 9 Michaela Pavlátová’s Carnal Carnival
Figure 9.1 Michaela Pavlátová 106 Figure 9.2 Az na veky 106 Figure 9.3 Karneval 106 10 Th éodore Ushev: Man Called Aerodynamics
Figure 10.1 Th éodore Ushev 118 Figure 10.2 Sou 118 Figure 10.3 Vertical 118 11 Bob Sabiston: Th e Unanimator
Figure 11.1 Bob Sabiston 132 Figure 11.2 Drink Creatures 132 Figure 11.3 Roadhead 132 12 Bruce Alcock: Th e Storyteller
Figure 12.1 Bruce Alcock 146 Figure 12.2 Quinte Hotel 146
Figure 12.3 Vive la Rose 146 13 Th e Tricks, Flies and Timing of Konstantin Bronzit
Figure 13.1 Switchcraft 156 Figure 13.2 Th e Round- About 156
Figure 13.3 Die Hard 156 14 Suzan Pitt: Dollhouses, Magic and Sexy Asparagus
Figure 14.1 Suzan Pitt 164 Figure 14.2 Woman cursing man 164 Figure 14.3 Doc and girl on horse 164 15 In the Dust and Moonlight of Don Hertzfeldt
Figure 15.1 Don Hertzfeldt 178 Figure 15.2 Rejected 178 Figure 15.3 I Am So Proud of You 178 16 Chris Shepherd: Who He Is and What He Wants
Figure 16.1 Chris Shepherd 190 Figure 16.2 Dad’s Dead 190
Figure 16.3 Pete 190
17 Run Wrake Ain’t No Meathead
Figure 17.1 Run Wrake 198
Figure 17.2 Rabbit 198 Figure 17.3 Th e Control Master 198
18 Th e Dreamworlds of Mait Laas
Figure 18.1 Mait Laas 208
Figure 18.2 Päevavalgus 208 Figure 18.3 Th e Way to Nirvana 208
19 John Canemaker: Confessions of an Animator
Figure 19.2 Bottom’s Dream 216 Figure 19.3 Th e Moon and Th e Son 216
20 Joanna Quinn: Beryl, Britannia and Bum- Wiping Bears Figure 20.1 Joanna Quinn 228 Figure 20.2 Beryl and Vince 228 Figure 20.3 Dreams and Desires: Family Tie 228
1
The Struggles of Independent Animation
I’d like to say that thephrase “animation isn’t just for kids and acne- scarred teens” is a cliché nowadays, but sadly, it isn’t and I’m not entirely confi dent that it ever will be.
Like animation, comics have long suffered from the same derogatory label, but in the last few decades have emerged as a more recognizable and popular art form for adults. Given the number of adaptations of adult comics/graphic novels that have been made during the last decade (for example, American
Splendour, Ghost World, Watchmen), the fi lm industry has
cer-tainly come to this understanding. Even the literary world has accepted comics (with the fancy name “graphic novels”) and many bookstores have even created graphic novel sections. Th at’s quite an achievement for a medium (yes, it’s a medium not a genre) that was previously always viewed as kid fodder.
Although independent animation has made major strides in recent years (the recent success of independent/adult animation features like Persepolis and Waltz with Bashir are prime examples), the belief is that animation is still hampered by the “cartoon” and “entertainment” labels.
the late 1950s, there were already a number of animators mak-ing “art” or “personal” animation, but before I give you a little historical background, perhaps we should go off track a second to explain just what the heck independent- or personal- or art animation is and isn’t.
Mainstream animations (often called “cartoons”) are usually made for a market place. Th eir content and style (the overall look) are researched and tailored towards a gender or age group. Th ey’re often genre- based, story/character driven and made as episodes with recurring characters. In fact, the success of these works relies heavily on the viewer connecting with the characters — Th e Simpsons is a prime example of this. Even feature
anima-tion fi lms are made with the possibility of sequels (for example,
Toy Story). Th ese works are made by studios and created by many artists working under the supervision of a committee of producers and executives.
Independent- , art- or personal animation avoids genres and are generally written, animated, directed and designed by a single artist. Th ese fi lms are usually self- contained and often use techniques rarely seen in mainstream animation (for example, cameraless animation — which can involve scratching or paint-ing on fi lm, object animation, paint- on- glass, pixilation — and speeding up or manipulating live- action footage). Th ese fi lms are usually funded, owned and distributed entirely by the animator.
Personally, I don’t like borders, so let’s just consider the above as rough guidelines set in erasable ink. Th ere’s a danger when we establish fi rm defi nitions. Th ere are some animation purists who refuse to accept computer as animation, and still more brush off mixed- media works that combine live- action and animation
(oddly enough, these same snots are the fi rst to hail Norman McLaren as the god of art animation even though he frequently fused live- action and animation).
Also, let’s be clear that just because a fi lm is independent, it doesn’t mean it’s good, just as mainstream animations are not always bad. Th ere are, for example, many animated music videos and TV commercials that rival any work of art, and some people would also hail a TV series like Th e Simpsons as a work of art in
itself.
Th ere’s often overlap between these two approaches. If we consider independent animation to be “auteur” driven (that is, every part of the work is made by a single author), what do we do with so- called mainstream animation made by auteurs? Betty Boop (Th e Fleischer brothers), Fritz the Cat (Ralph Bakshi), Ren
and Stimpy (John Kricfalusi), and the classic Looney Tunes shorts
(made by a team of artists working under the instructions of a studio producer, yet each short bears the distinctive mark of its own director) are just a few examples of this overlap.
On the independent side, Nick Park (the Wallace and Gromit fi lms), Bill Plympton, PES and Adam Benjamin Elliot (Harvie
Krumpet) straddle the border between art and entertainment.
Each of these examples (in Park’s case, he has already crossed over into the mainstream arena) works in a recognizable style and tone, often uses recurring characters and ultimately has an eye towards mainstream success — not that there’s anything wrong with that.
In fact, as you’ll discover when reading the 20 animator profi les in this book, the line between independent and mainstream, or art and entertainment, is very blurry.
Brief History of Independent Animation
Independent animation dates back to the beginnings of anima-tion. Animation pioneers like J. Stuart Blackton (Humorous
Phases of Funny Faces, 1906), Emile Cohl (Phantasmagorie, 1908),
Winsor McCay (Gertie the Dinosaur, 1914), Wladyslaw Starewicz (Th e Cameraman’s Revenge, 1919, made using real dead insects)
and Lotte Reiniger (made her fi rst silhouette fi lm in 1918) were independent, experimental animators. Other early indepen-dent animators were Len Lye (whose direct- on- fi lm animations would infl uence Norman McLaren), Hans Richter, and Oskar Fischinger.
For many, Norman McLaren is considered the Walt Disney of experimental/independent animation. Even though he died over 20 years ago, his fi lms, including Neighbours, Begone Dull
Care and A Chairy Tale, continue to infl uence animation artists
around the world.
It’s also interesting to note that until the birth of television in the 1950s, animation — even though it was gag orientated — was actually made primarily for adults. Recurring popular characters like Betty Boop, Koko the Clown, Bugs Bunny, Daff y Duck, and Felix the Cat were all made with an eye on an adult audience.
By the 1950s there were independent animators around the world; however, there was a problem. With television veering towards episodic formats, cinemas showing fewer animation shorts (even then, they showed popular studio shorts like Warner Bros.) and fi lm festivals marginalizing or ignoring animation, there were very few places for animators to have their work shown.
In 1960, two events took place that changed the course of independent animation: Annecy, France, hosted the world’s fi rst international animation festival (the Annecy International Animated Film Festival), and during the festival, the International Animated Film Association (ASIFA), consisting of animators around the world, was born. ASIFA’s aim was to promote and preserve the art of animation.
One of ASIFA’s important initiatives was the push and sup-port for more animation festivals. By the mid- 1970s, ASIFA was sanctioning Annecy, Zagreb (Croatia) and Ottawa (Canada). Hiroshima would join the group in the mid- 1980s. Th ese four festivals — which are all still in existence — are considered the “granddaddies” of the animation festival circuit.
Not only did animation festivals put an emphasis on experi-mental/independent animation, but they also served as a meeting point for animators. Th is was especially important during the Cold War period, when travel outside the Iron Curtain was severely limited.
Perhaps the most important impact that ASIFA and animation festivals (and even the National Film Board of Canada which, because of McLaren, attracted animators from around the world) had was that they encouraged the emergence of a new generation of independent animators. In the 1970s in particular, a wave of young animators emerged: George Griffi n, David Ehrlich, Ryan Larkin, Pierre Hébert, Suzan Pitt, Priit Pärn (Estonia), Bob Godfrey, Bruno Bozzetto, Renzo Kinoshita, Yuri Norstein (whose 1979 fi lm Tale of Tales is routinely hailed as the greatest animation fi lm ever made) and others.
much that festivals — which had traditionally been biennial — became annual events. As an example of the growth, the Ottawa International Animation Festival received approximately 750 fi lm submissions in 1992 (these fi lms were made over a two- year period) and by 2008, the now annual festival received over 2,100 submissions.
Th e growth of the animation industry in the late 1990s played a role in the increase in animation schools and studios and anima-tors. Technology, though, was the biggest motivator: animators who once took anywhere from three to fi ve to ten years to make a fi lm could now turn them around in a year. Th e rise of the internet also gave animators another means of getting their fi lm to an audience, via YouTube or their own websites.
Th e days of having to decide whether you were going down the mainstream road or the art road also disappeared, and technology enabled many animators to start up their own studios. Today, smaller, boutique studios exist around the world; these studios tend to balance commercial and independent work, using profi ts from commissioned jobs to pay for their short fi lms. Some anima-tors, such as Bill Plympton and Nina Paley, have even made their own animation features.
It should be added that independent animation has had a major impact on mainstream animation. While the content is still primarily tepid and conservative, mainstream animation has exploded visually, incorporating many new styles and techniques (often borrowed by the independent world).
What a fantastic story, isn’t it? What’s not to like? Well, a few things actually. First, visibility is still a problem. While graphic novels have been accepted in the mainstream book world,
independent animation still fi ghts for an audience. Television (at least in North America) doesn’t have room for short fi lms, and cinemas gave up on short fi lms long ago. Certainly, artists are reaching new audiences through the internet, DVDs, and mobile technology, but 50 years since Annecy hosted international ani-mators, festivals remain the primary exhibition place.
Second, in the comic world, there are a number of magazines that profi le the artists and off er critical discussion about their work — this is something seriously lacking in animation. Most of the books about animation focus solely on the history of American animation; you can fi nd endless books with some new perspective on Disney, Pixar, and Bugs Bunny’s love of cross- dressing, but the few magazines that exist are little more than press releases for the industry. Th ere are some online websites (awn.com) and blogs (cartoonbrew.com) that off er occasional pieces about independent animators, but for the most part these artists are ignored. When they are acknowledged, it’s usually without criticism. How does an art form grow without some hard- hitting feedback?
Another predicament facing both mainstream and indepen-dent animators is a general lack of awareness of the artists behind the fi lms. For most people, animation is defi ned by characters (Mickey Mouse, the Powerpuff Girls, Bart Simpson) or by studios (Pixar, DreamWorks, Disney); however, if you asked these same people who John Lasseter (Pixar), Mike Judge (King of the Hill ) and Stephen Hillenburg (SpongeBob SquarePants) are, they’d likely have no answer.
Animation, one of the most intimate of art forms, remains the most anonymous.
Which leads us to this book. Now, you won’t fi nd much hard- hitting criticism in these pages. My primary aim is to introduce you to a selection of international independent animators so that you can learn about who they are, what they do and why they do it.
Th e choice of animators profi led in the book is highly subjec-tive. Having written an earlier book of animator profi les (Unsung
Heroes of Animation), I avoided repeats, and I also selected artists
that I personally like and some whose work straddles that border between mainstream and independent.
It’s my hope that these introductions will encourage you to go out and see more work from these and other fi ne independent animators.
Figure 1.2 Second Nature
11
Skip Battaglia
Skip Man Motion
From his name to life and fi lms, everything about Rochester animator Skip Battaglia speaks movement; Battaglia, an avid hiker and run-ner, is the perennial traveler, always moving, searching, fi nding and feeling. His fi lms refl ect this hunger for movement and new perspectives. In Battaglia’s world, to stand still is to stagnate and to die. To move is to be eternally in motion, mentally, spiritually and physically. When we move, we learn to see diff erently and become more in sync with our environment.
Battaglia’s fi rst meaningful encounter with animation came while he was studying literature in college. “Th ere was a teacher, he was in the English department but he was teaching a fi lm course and he had a short fi lm he was projecting on the wall of his offi ce in 16 mm. Bruce Baillie’s Castro Street — an experimental fi lm — and I looked at that and came into it in the middle and said, ‘What is that?’ I said, ‘Play that again.’ I looked at that and it just had Bruce Baillie’s name at the bottom and I thought, ‘I didn’t know you could make a fi lm by yourself.’ You know, I thought you needed accountants and a factory system to make a fi lm. I thought it was a very beautiful, diff erent sort of fi lm.”
Born in Buff alo, New York, Battaglia’s dad was part- owner of a drive- in movie theater. “I used to show up in my pyjamas, you
know, and make it through the cartoons and probably fall asleep in the back seat. And so there was always that experience of, you know, movies were something. My mother would sell the tickets and make the popcorn and my father would run the projector and I would fall asleep.”
After studying English literature at Boston College, Battaglia worked a variety of jobs, including editing interviews for a German television show (despite not speaking German), working in a steel plant and teaching at a high school.
In 1975, Battaglia came to Rochester, New York, through a grant he received to set up a fi lm equipment co- op to serve upstate. “I travelled around to diff erent counties teaching com-munity groups how to use fi lm equipment in anticipation of what was going to happen with cable, where, you know, there would be community channels and people would be running around with video cameras and you would be able to get everything on the air.”
Battaglia, like so many independent animators, stumbled into animation by chance. While undertaking his master’s degree at Syracuse University (SU), he found an animation camera in a back room of the school. “It was a television facility, but the Oxberry [animation camera] was no longer much used for TV graphics. An adjunct teacher had an animated TV graphics course. I off ered to become his teaching assistant. After gradua-tion, the teacher let me have a key to the room if I would shoot only Tuesday nights (the evening when he taught). I shot maybe only every 2–3 weeks. I would fi nish a day’s work in Rochester (I had begun to teach part time), pack up the car with materials and drawings, drive the 76 miles to SU, load the camera, shoot till 1 or 2 a.m., unload, drive back to Rochester — getting breakfast
along the way — get home at 4 a.m. or 5, appear at part- time work Wednesday at noon. Th at’s how I started with animation. It was very exciting.”
Animation attracted Battaglia because of its poetic possibilities. “I had a view of fi lm which was poetic, that you could make a fi lm like you could write a poem or like a writer would make a book. Th e joy of being able to make something, like a poet, where you’re responsible for every image, I only started doing that after I turned 30. I lost a job. I said, ‘Well I’ve got time, I don’t have money. I’ll draw a fi lm.’”
And that fi lm was Boccioni’s Bike (1981), an astonishing debut about a bike ride. Inspired by futurist art, Battaglia explores the rhythms of the bike ride from various perspectives. Th e fi lm begins with a segment of a bicyclist beginning his ride, and then, as he moves and gets more into the fl ow of his motion, the images break apart, becoming more abstract. Anyone who creates or exercises knows that feeling of getting in the zone, of being so in tune with the motion of your body and surroundings that you lose yourself. Everything momentarily becomes one.
Boccioni’s Bike took Battaglia three years to make, “’cause I
threw out a year and a half of stuff . I didn’t know where it was going and I was reading some futurist materials about the fi lms that still are around. Th ere are only two of the futurist fi lms that are still in collections. And they would take their fi lms and shoot ’em black and white and they would dye them blue. So the fi lms would be black and blue and when asked why they did that, they said because they wanted the fi lm to indicate a state of mind. I said, ‘Wow, this is great. Th is is what I’m drawing. I’ve channelled futurism.’”
Initially, the images were rotoscoped, but as Battaglia became more confi dent in his drawing, he stopped rotoscoping altogether. “I picked out a very simple movement, a rotational movement, and once I learned that I stopped rotoscoping. Th at’s why I fi rst threw out the fi rst year and a half of drawings and only kept a couple of them. Partly because it was so obviously rotoscoped and I had begun to learn the movement. Th e other reason was that I didn’t know about pigments and uh, materials to work with and so I was using crayons, which was very fl at on the surface of the paper and didn’t photograph well. So as I started experimenting with how things photographed I realized I couldn’t do work with crayons. I had to use pencils and ink. It would take into the paper. ’Cause I wanted the surface of the paper.”
To get the chaotic sound of clinking objects and to create the fi lm’s rhythm, Battaglia invited some neighbors over, gave them various tools and got them drunk. “I had bought an 1867 house for $18,000. I was living in it and I was redoing the electricity and everything in the house, so I had all these tools around in the garage. It was like this and we drank a lot of red wine and went in there and we started just pounding tools around. And then I took it on audio tape and I edited it and saw how it went with the fi lm and that gave me a sound track that I could continue drawing on and once I had the audio track down and had it planned out what I was going to do kind of rhythmically and acoustically, then the rest of the drawing on the fi lm took ten months with everything else I did.”
For a guy who had not only never made an animation fi lm before, but had never really even drawn, Boccioni’s Bike is a revela-tion, a poetic masterpiece that reveals animation’s ability to take
the viewer on an abstract journey through the subconscious to give voice to the daily unseen of our lives.
While he was making Boccioni’s Bike, Battaglia started work on a very diff erent fi lm, Parataxis (1980). “A Xerox copier was available at the George Eastman House, available for artists to use. I always wanted to make a fi lm with a Xerox machine.”
Using a mixture of live- action footage and photocopies, Battaglia shows us a seemingly straightforward image of a man observing a beautiful woman in a fabric shop. As he watches her roam about the shop, we hear a man’s voice (we presume it is the same man) talk about the woman, his memory, and why he doesn’t approach her. She leaves the store, the two never making contact. Th e scenario is repeated a second and third time only sound and image have been re- arranged.
Th e idea for the fi lm’s concept came from a variety of sources including poet Joseph Brodsky and Orson Welles’s fi lm Citizen
Kane. “I was teaching Citizen Kane. I was teaching a fi lm history
course every year and I realized that I was going to have to teach
Citizen Kane every year of my stupid life. And the character
Bernstein says, ‘Well, memory’s a funny thing.’ And so I took the quote from him, about the woman that he saw and hardly a week passes he doesn’t remember her, about a woman he saw forty years ago. And then a line from Brodsky’s autobiography, ‘Am I the story I tell myself?’”
Battaglia then tossed in some other lines, grabbed a notebook, and wrote them down. “Th en I took the lines and I wrote them on index cards and then I shuffl ed them. I was going to call the fi lm ‘Shuffl e’ and maybe I should have. Um, and I did eight shuffl es and read it into a microphone and shuffl ed them again
and I took the best four sequences that seemed to tell a story. Later, I arranged the imagery with the soundtrack and realized I only needed three passes and not four. ’Cause I wanted the fi lm to end when people say, ‘Oh, we got this fi gured out.’”
While Parataxis couldn’t be more visually different from
Boccioni’s Bike, the concept continues Battaglia’s fascination with
making the invisible visible and giving voice to the unseen every-day workings inside us. As Paul Auster wrote in Th e Invention of Solitude, “memory is the second time an event happened.” It’s
the fi rst time we are telling it from our perspective. Each time we remember an event, something changes, however minute.
How the Frog’s Eye Sees (1984) fi nds Battaglia again dealing with
movement and perspective, this time through the eyes of a frog. Th e viewer is dumped into a pond. We pass through weeds, fl ies buzz around us until a red tongue lashes out, and there is silence. Th ere are long moments of waiting and sitting as the gentle wind caresses the weeds. Finally, we’re immersed in the dark blue of the water. Snippets of a fi sh appear. Th ere is a fl ash of red. Th en there is nothing.
Frog’s Eye sees (pun intended) Battaglia combining elements
of cartoons, nature fi lms and abstract imagery (the images of the fl ies buzzing and almost exploding on the screen transforms into a non- fi gurative dance of sound and motion) to create, essentially, an almost existentialist fi lm. Th ere is life, then there’s nothing.
During this time, Battaglia started his career at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), where he remains today. He’d been teaching fi lm history at St. John Fisher College when he was approached by fi lmmaker Howard Lester. Lester was in charge
of a newly formed fi lm program at RIT and he asked Battaglia to join him.
Many artists admit that there are times when the students actu-ally teach the teachers, by bringing in fresh perspectives about art and technology. Th at’s not quite the case with Battaglia. “Well, with computers, I’m not intuitive about a computer and for this generation, they’re much more intuitive about it, so I pick up tricks about technique, but that’s not really my interest. I’ve learned a lot about my students, but not about animation. I wish that they would teach me more.”
Like his fi lms, Battaglia’s life is about movement. When he’s not running, he’s hiking across the US. Battaglia began hiking in 1964, and on his most recent hike, in 2007, Battaglia spent 222 days hiking across the US landscape. “When you’re running or hiking, you feel you’re seeing more somehow because it’s the fasci-nation of the landscape propelled past you as you’re engaging it.”
Geologic Time (1989) is a direct result of Battaglia’s hiking
experience. A dazzling landscape of clouds, mountains and land rushes by. It’s an overwhelming experience, and the images leave as quickly as they enter; there’s little time to savour them before they’re gone. Suddenly, a man and woman appear, trees fall and buildings explode on the landscape: in an instant, the landscape, the sounds of nature are gone. “Th at’s from hiking. Th at’s from getting stoned and sitting on top of mountains and looking at landscape. Sometimes I swear I could see the curvature of the earth. I started to paint then and I was curious about painting landscape and I wanted a fi lm that was rather painterly.”
Th e theme of man and industry destroying nature is not a particularly new one, but Battaglia does a decent job of avoiding
clichés. Th e ending is sudden, yet from a hiking experience it seems to make sense. For days, weeks, months, there is nothing but trees, grass, clouds, mountains, rivers. Th en, in an instant, it’s gone, replaced by skyscrapers, gas stations and hotels.
In Restlessness (1994), Battaglia delves inside himself for inspi-ration. Photocopied images of a sleeping naked man race on the screen. Th e man is still but anxious. Various images appear, seemingly from inside the man: a runner, houses, collapsing houses, a woman, colliding bodies, maps and, most notably, snakes. Th is diaristic fi lm takes us inside the mind of an artist so that we (and he) can see what imagery is rampant within his subconscious.
“I carried in my dreams, so I kept a dream journal. Also, I was camping out in the desert in Nevada. And it was a public camp area, cause there was water there and they had a concrete block privy and, with poured concrete fl oor and I’d walk in and there would be a painted snake on the concrete fl oor. And that’s just to tell people to watch out, there might be snakes in here, come in, out of the heat. And I knew that painted snake was there every time. And every time I walked in there, something inside of me jumped. Something just jumped and I said, ‘Geez I’m afraid of snakes. What is this?’ So, I use the idea of the snake and the whole thing is designed to maintain the imagery of the snake. It’s like the roots to tie everything together.”
Snakes and frogs aren’t the only creatures that have inspired Battaglia’s work. In the lighthearted fi lm Taki Dom (1997) — a collaboration with Julie Ann Jergens and Dan Pejril — chickens take the stage. Made as a music video for vocal trio called F’loom,
manically across the screen to the accompaniment of the trio’s language music.
“I got fi ve rings of paper, copier paper and two dead chickens and some buckets of acrylic, acrylic paint and I got a couple of students and we took over a studio and we just painted the chickens, pounded them on the paper, tore off a wing, painted it . . . pounded it on a couple of sheets of paper.”
Wait, did he say “dead chickens?” Yes, he did.
Turns out that although it’s illegal (at least in New York state) to buy an unplucked chicken, Battaglia found a farm that would do it for him. “I had to do it really early in the morning. Th e farmer’s wife went behind the barn and cracked the necks.”
Th e entire fi lm was made in about three hours. Th ree more hours were spent sitting around drinking coff ee, “’cause we real-ized what we were going to do with these dead chickens (tearing them apart and everything and painting them) and that they smelled like, you know, chicken fat and stuff .”
’Nuff said.
Following Second Nature (2000) —“My cartoon fi lm” — and an unsuccessful attempt to make a computer fi lm, More True Shit (2003), Battaglia returned to his pencils and made his master-work, Crossing the Stream (2006).
Th e premise of Crossing the Stream is as simple as they come: a man takes his horse across a stream. Yet, within that simple story is a magnifi cent, mind- blowing evocation of movement and spirituality. As the man and the horse hit the water, Battaglia takes us on a stoner/Zen trip; All consciousness is lost. Accompanied by the sounds of water and Tibetan singing bowls, water, animal,
man, artist and viewer become one. It’s like those moments when you’re jogging (or driving, for you slackers) and you’ve run about half a mile, when you suddenly seem to wake and can’t really remember the last half mile because you’re so in tune with the movement and rhythm of your body: Th is is the experience of watching the scene in Crossing the Stream. As though hypnotized, you don’t even realize it’s happened until it’s over. In the end, the man and the horse walk on and you wonder what the fuck that was all about and can you do it again, please?
Currently, Battaglia is fi nishing up a new fi lm called Car Crash
Opera. “It’s 8 minutes. I want to criticize the car crash fi lm by
making a cartoon of it at fi rst, but the second half of the fi lm is after the car crash. Th e fi rst 2 and a half minutes is developing the characters and then I got about a 2- minute car crash which is a lot of red pencil and ink, but then I’ve got this whole trail off of voices and it gets rather mournful. I want to criticize the form itself and then end with a little joke.”
While Battaglia’s fi lms certainly fall into the realm of abstract or experimental animation, they’re not cold, pretentious or devoid of personality; Battaglia’s works are ambitious but always warm, personable and often funny. Th is is a man who enjoys his work and, more importantly, clearly enjoys life and extracts everything he can from it.
Figure 2.2 Drunky
23
Aaron Augenblick
Last Exit to Brooklyn
There’s never been a richer time in animation. With the emergence of new technologies that have made animation more aff ordable to produce and an animation boom that saw a rise in anima-tion producanima-tion on TV and the internet, in commercials, music videos, and in cinemas, the opportunity exists for animators to successfully straddle the line between commercial and artistic work. Brooklyn- based Aaron Augenblick is part of a growing trend of animators who operate small boutique studios that take on selective commissioned projects and then put their profi ts into creating personal short fi lms.
Augenblick’s background fi ttingly refl ects his duo- animation citizenship; originally from Wilmington, Delaware, his father was a mechanical engineer and his mother an art teacher. “I feel like I am a perfect amalgam of these two schools of thought,” says Augenblick. “I was raised with an appreciation for science and mechanical things, as well as a love of art and creativity. When I was a little kid, my dad built a robot arm called ORCA that is used to this day in chemical laboratories.”
Augenblick was interested in animation at a very early age. “I had a crappy Apple IIe computer when I was a kid, with some primitive animation programs. My main character was a purple
glob of goo who went on crazy adventures. Th ey were very stupid, but I was doing my best to create funny stories like the ones I watched on TV.”
It wasn’t until high school though that Augenblick really felt that he could pursue a career in animation. While attending an animation summer course at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Augenblick tried traditional (drawn) animation for the fi rst time. Th e experience changed his life. “When I saw my fi rst pencil test it blew my mind. I made an old lady walking across the street with a walker. I had no idea what I was doing, so the old lady undulated and morphed into all kinds of crazy shapes as she walked. However, there was a life to the movement and the drawings that I had never encountered before and I knew I had to keep doing this and get better.”
While majoring in animation at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York, Augenblick made his fi rst two fi lms, Th e Wire
(1996) and Midnight Carnival (1997). Augenblick’s bold graphic and dark sensibilities are already present in the early black- and- white fi lm Midnight Carnival. Th e protagonist — the Dignifi ed Devil — is drinking alone in a bar. He fi nishes his drink, wanders the streets and then stumbles upon a lit doorway in an alley. He enters and discovers a strange carnival of freaks taking place. After walking through the carnival and seeing how one of the freaks sees him as a freak, the Devil remains and becomes part of the show.
After graduation, Augenblick took a breather from animation, but while working in Virginia as a night clerk in a hotel, MTV Animation came calling. “Th ey had seen Midnight Carnival and asked me to work on the animated adaptation of the comic book
York and went to work.” Augenblick ended up working for MTV on a variety of shows including Hate, Daria and Downtown, but by 1999 he was tired of doing hired work and wanted to go back to making his own fi lms. “I wrote a script for an animated feature and showed it to a friend. He liked it so we pulled our money together and rented a small space in Brooklyn. I got a few more friends and we produced a 3- minute excerpt from the feature in an attempt to secure fi nancing for the feature. Th at excerpt was
Ramblin’ Man. Unfortunately, we never got any funding, so we
ran out of money fast. My partner left the studio and I was unable to continue paying any employees. I was at a very low point, with a failing studio and no idea what to do.”
At that point, Augenblick decided that the best approach would be to combine freelance and independent work. “Th e idea was that I would be doing freelance work by day, while doing independent projects by night. Th is is when I think we became a real studio. I worked on a ton of freelance gigs, and also made
Drunky, Plugs McGinniss and Th e Dignifi ed Devil. Small jobs
began to lead to bigger jobs and our fi rst big break was Shorties
Watchin’ Shorties on Comedy Central. After that, I’ve had the
luxury of being choosy about the freelance jobs we take on as a production studio. In addition, I have been able to develop my own projects like Golden Age.”
Augenblick’s fi rst independent fi lm was the striking Ramblin’
Man (2000). In this short, a robotic cowboy and his horse on
wheels ride to the Hank Williams tune. While there isn’t much meat to the story, the visuals contain a stunning array of colors and original designs that clearly echo 1930s animation, in par-ticular the work of the Fleischer Brothers and Ub Iwerks.
Th e fi lm came from a dream sequence that Augenblick origi-nally intended for a feature called Th e Robot’s Song. “Th e story was about a circus- robot who runs away and fi nds love in the big city. I always loved Hank Williams, and this song was the perfect voice for the robot’s dream of being a rootless drifter. We never got to make the full movie, but Ramblin’ Man had a good life in animation festivals.”
After fi nishing Ramblin’ Man, Augenblick stumbled onto Flash animation (created using Adobe Flash software). When asked by a prospective employer if he knew the software, Augenblick lied and said that he did. “I learned it over a weekend, and started work on that Monday,” remembers Augenblick. “I was amazed at how easy it was to create a fully realized cartoon. I had just fi nished Ramblin’ Man, which was 3 minutes long and took about a year to make. My fi rst Flash cartoon took about one week for the same amount of animation. I knew that even though it was a clumsy program, Flash was the key for my studio to create animation in a more feasible and economical way. Over the years, I have continued to evolve the way I use the program, to avoid using gimmicks and make more traditionally animated cartoons.”
The Dignified Devil in Shirley Temple (2001) was an early
experiment with Adobe Flash and a return to the main character of Midnight Carnival. It’s not one of Augenblick’s stronger fi lms, but it is unique in that it off ers a rare display of Augenblick’s seri-ous side. Th is time, the Devil protagonist wakes up in a hotel. Outside he sees twin girls fi ghting; he goes outside and ends up going after one of the troubled twins. Th ey walk the streets together, talk and fuck. Th en they sleep, she pukes on him and they go their separate ways. Th e story has a nightmarish David
Lynch tone to it (Lynch’s work clearly infl uences Augenblick), but this strange moment between these two people is also grounded in reality. Th is blurring of nightmare and reality will become a common theme in Augenblick’s work.
Another early Adobe Flash film was the hilarious Drunky (2002), which tells a rather unusual story of a straight guy who has sex with men when he gets drunk. Even at this early stage of Flash animation, Augenblick’s bold visual style and innovative character designs immediately catch the eye and serve as the perfect complement to the distressed state of the main character. “I thought it would be funny if there was a straight guy who, whenever he got drunk, would black out and wake up having just had sex with a guy,” adds Augenblick. “So, he would drink to deal with his emotional distress, and end up having sex with another guy again. A vicious circle. Th en I added in the Disney angle (what’s gayer than Disney?), having the antagonist be a classic Disney villain, complete with a ‘Pink Elephants’ style hallucination sequence.”
2003 was a breakout year for Augenblick: during the year he completed a new short, Plugs McGinniss (about an alcoholic seeing- eye dog), a commissioned short called Th e Man with the Smallest Penis (about a man with a microscopic dick who fi nds
love with a lab technician) and began work on a series for Comedy Central called Shorties Watchin’ Shorties (2003–4). Th e series fea-tured animated interpretations of stand- up routines from dozens of comedians including Dane Cook, Mike Birbiglia, Lewis Black, Bill Burr, Colin Quinn and Jim Gaffi gan. “It was created by Eric Brown of World Famous Pictures,” says Augenblick. “He was a fan of Drunky and contacted me to create animated content
for the show. Basically, they would send us audio clips and we would fi nd a funny way to animate them. We would have studio brainstorm sessions where everyone would come up with visual gags for the bits. It was a really fun time, and we produced a hell of a lot of animation.”
After fi nishing Shorties, Augenblick landed another TV gig, this time for the MTV children’s show parody, Wonder Showzen. When series creators John Lee and Vernon Chatman invited Augenblick to do the show’s animation, they could not have found a more perfect fi t for their twisted comic sensibilities. “It ended up being a match made in heaven. I still think Wonder
Showzen was one of the best television shows of all time. Th e wide variety of styles we had to work in really pushed our limits, and made our studio much stronger artistically. It was always fun to get a new assignment from them and fi gure out how we were going to pull it off . We worked on Wonder Showzen for the two seasons it was on the air and it’s still probably the work that we are best known for.”
Augenblick directed all the shorts for the show and was given a long artistic leash. “Th ey would send us a script, audio and rough designs and we would have a discussion about the overall direction,” says Augenblick. “Sometimes they would have a very specifi c subject they were lampooning and other times it was more vague. Sometimes we would take it in a diff erent direc-tion they expected, but they were always encouraging us to be creative.”
One of the standout shorts is Mr. Bible. Th ree characters rep-resenting sex, drugs and violence interrupt the nightly prayers of a sweet young child. Mr. Bible shows up to protect the boy but
quickly fi nds himself drawn into the beliefs of the other char-acters. From that moment, all hell breaks loose as the Bible gets drunk, fucks the Koran and frees Jesus from the crucifi x so that he can score with twins and break- dance in the church. Th e bit is not more than a minute long, but in that time Augenblick has cre-ated a hilarious and scathing satire of Christianity. Augenblick’s inspired ’30s- era animation adds a rich layer of irony to the piece: the young boy looks like a typical Disney character from that time, with his soft angelic features and gentle giant eyes. In the fi nal scene, the break- dancing Jesus recalls the strange, rotoscoped Cab Calloway routine from Th e Fleischer Brothers short, Snow
White (1933).
“Mr. Bible is one of my favorite Wonder Showzen bits,” says Augenblick. “Th ey wanted it to be in a ’30s Fleischer style which is my personal favorite era of animation. We looked at a lot of old Betty Boop and Popeye cartoons and did our best to replicate that era. I always loved the weird rotoscoping that the Fleischers used to do, so we threw some in by having Jesus Christ do a little break- dancing at the end of the cartoon.”
In 2006, Augenblick produced Golden Age, his fi nest work to date. Not surprisingly, the 22- minute faux documentary began its life as a commissioned series of episodes for Comedy Central.
Golden Age is a masterpiece of parody that follows the
scandal-ous lives of ten animated characters that have stumbled from stardom into a variety of misfortunes ranging from addiction to serial killings.
“Golden Age,” says Augenblick, “started out as a pitch I wrote for a show about a retirement home for over- the- hill cartoon characters. Comedy Central was interested in it, but they felt
the format was too similar to Drawn Together, which they were about to debut. Th ey asked me if I could adapt the characters into a diff erent format, and I hit upon the idea of presenting each character as a short documentary subject. Th ey loved the idea, and commissioned us to do ten episodes. It was a really exciting project, because it allowed us to experiment with a wide variety of mixed- media and try a lot of things we had never done before.”
Golden Age shows Augenblick expanding his graphic and
story-telling skills. It’s not often that an episodic piece of this length can sustain its energy, but Augenblick pulls it off with deft comic timing, rich character development (including many animation archetypes), and an array of techniques that masterfully mimic the animation of a character’s time (from 1930s- era rubber hose animation to the limited, lame animation of the seventies and eighties). Augenblick’s graphic approach is so informed and on the mark that Golden Age also serves as an impromptu history of animation techniques and styles.
“I’m a huge fan of animation history,” says Augenblick, “and by the diff erent styles and techniques animators have used in the past 100 or so years. I was lucky enough to be one of the last classes at SVA that had to learn how to use an Oxberry camera and that has informed a lot of the replications we’ve done of the old techniques.”
Th e success of Golden Age and Wonder Showzen has brought Augenblick a steady stream of interesting work, including Sesame
Street (a nifty piece about tall tales, featuring Johnny Cash), a
short for comedian Louis C.K. and work on the ultra- violent, Gary Panter- infl uenced Adult Swim TV show Superjail! (2007). What’s remarkable about Augenblick’s success is that no matter
the type of work, his visual style is almost always recognizable and, more importantly, there’s a common trait to all of his char-acters. Fusing the comic surrealism of the Fleischers with the nightmarish scenarios of David Lynch and the troubled, feeble characters of Hubert Selby Jr., Augenblick’s protagonists are a messed- up bunch, struggling through absurd, haunting experi-ences, trying to fi nd a semblance of identity and place.
Figure 3.2 Ryan 1
33
Chris Landreth’s Psychorealism
Although computer animation has made gigantic strides during the last 20- plus years, it still remains crippled by uninspired concepts, plastic, hollow environments and cold and almost creepy char-acter designs. Part of the problem is that animators (particularly students) spend so much time learning (and relearning) new technologies that the result is often rushed and incomplete. Many animators are at the mercy of the software — they let it lead them. With the bulk of their time spent dealing with the technical side, concepts seem to come last, hence the fl ood of generic garbage that is produced each year.
Canadian animator Chris Landreth is among the few com-puter animators creating strikingly original and intelligent fi lms. Landreth’s works are occupied by worlds and characters that initially seem surreal, but which transform into very real and disturbing insights into human psychology.
What’s all the more remarkable about Landreth’s story is that he was never much of an animation fan as a kid and only stumbled into the fi eld in his twenties. “I had almost no interest in Saturday morning stuff when I was a kid,” recalls Landreth. “I liked Rankin/Bass stop- motion stuff , you know, the Christmas specials. I suppose that got my attention. Not much else did. And then I went to school thinking I would be a scientist or
an engineer. I went to undergraduate university and eventually graduate school.”
It was during Landreth’s fi rst year of graduate school at the University of Illinois that animation caught his attention. “Th is computer graphics program started down the street from where I was doing my graduate studies and working. And although I really didn’t want to go back to school again, it did seem kind of cool that I’d be able to perhaps hang out in this environment and either learn stuff through osmosis or actually get more com-mitted. And I got to do that. I got to learn how to use Wavefront software.”
During his computer studies, Landreth made a 2- minute fi lm called Th e Listener. Th e fi lm was invited to the prestigious computer animation festival Siggraph in 1991. Based on the fi lm, Landreth was off ered a job doing scientifi c visualization (using animation to visualize scientifi c data) at North Carolina Supercomputing Center (NCSC).
Landreth made two more fi lms at NCSC: Caustic Sky (about the scintillating topic of acid rain formation) and Data Driven:
Th e Story of Franz K (1993). Both fi lms were accepted to Siggraph,
but it was Landreth’s 1993 trip to the festival that would change the course of his life. “A bunch of us from this North Carolina Supercomputing Center [were] down in Anaheim, California. We got [an] e- mail from the director of the home offi ce, glee-fully sending out e- mails saying that a massive restructuring was impending and that there was to be no need for a visualization group anymore. So we were all going to be out of a job. It so happened that we got that e- mail the afternoon of a huge party at Siggraph put on by Industrial Light and Magic. It was there that
I met people at Alias. And basically managed to work up terms of a job with them. Right then and there. Th ey off ered me a job as a, what they called, expert user. I started New Year’s Day, 1994.”
Alias Research was keen to get into the animation market. Th ey hired programmers to make software, and Landreth’s job was to use the software as it was being made.
“Th e deal that I was able to make with them,” says Landreth, “was that I’d be happy to do that, but that they would need to trust me that I would want to do creative stuff , like make fi lms.”
Using software called PowerAnimator, Landreth’s fi rst “test- drive” was a fi lm called Th e End (1995). Two wiry characters
fl oat and dance on a stage and pontifi cate to each other about life and art. Everything stops suddenly when a voice interrupts their performance/dialogue to inform them that they are characters created by an animator. Th e camera reveals the animator (who looks an awful lot like Landreth) and his storyboard for the fi lm we’ve just watched, but after struggling to come up with an end-ing, the animator realizes that he is himself just another fi ctional character in this farce.
The End is a smart and rather scathing Pirandello- tinged
parody of painfully pretentious experimental/abstract fi lms that seem to speak to no one but the creator, and Landreth had a specifi c target in mind: computer animation. “Th e story itself is very much a parody of computer graphic fi lms that had been coming out. Th ere was such a degree of self- importance and all this lingo- speak that was developing. Interactivity started to become a big buzzword then, and that paradigms were shifting and that visual language was being created and stuff . So a lot of what those characters are saying at the beginning are actually
mishmash I would lift from these treatises and academic papers and kind of screw around with.”
Th e End was a marvel in the context of computer animation:
here was a work that used innovative computer designs to actu-ally tell a funny story with a solid concept. It also showed how computer animation, rather than drifting off into hallucinogenic or nerd landscapes and sci- fi worlds, could instead be used to look inward at humanity and the nature of art itself.
Th e End was an immediate success and earned Landreth an
Academy Award nomination for Animation Short Film, putting him fi rmly on the list of animation artists to watch in the future.
Landreth didn’t disappoint: he returned with Bingo (1998), a brilliant piece of satire taken from a theatre company in Chicago. “I grew up in Chicago,” says Landreth. And my sister actually dragged me to come see this theatre company called the New Futurists. I was very resistant. But she dragged me out there. And I saw these guys perform, and I’d never seen anything like this. It’s very interactive and improvisational and usually quite absurdist. Some of them are just spoken word monologues.
I’d clearly felt that I could take one of these performances verbatim and create an animation out of it. And so I talked with the director afterwards and introduced myself, and said I’ve really got to see as much of this material as you’ve got, either on video or I’ll pore through this stuff live. And he sent me two or three hours of video footage of the plays just being performed live, raw.”
Landreth was particularly interested in a short play they did called Disregard this Play. With permission from the theater group, Landreth took their performance and turned it into an animated fi lm.
Th e lights shine on a meek young man in what appears to be an empty room. A clown enters and casually says, “Hi Bingo. Bingo the Clown.” Th e man says that he’s not Bingo, but the clown ignores him and continues to greet him as Bingo. Each time the clown speaks, his voice gets angrier and his physical appearance begins to change. A woman (dressed as a ringmaster) enters the scene and says, “music please.” Circus music begins and a variety of strange monitors and fi gures appear out of nowhere. Other characters that emerge continue to aggressively insist that the man is Bingo. Finally, the poor, beaten guy gives up and readily admits that he is indeed Bingo the Clown.
Bingo is a masterpiece of absurdity complemented by
stun-ning and original computer graphics and character designs that enhance the fi lm’s nightmarish dialogue and atmosphere. And where did Landreth fi nd his inspiration for the visual look of the fi lm? “It came,” he says in all seriousness, “from a revulsion of clowns. I grew up in Chicago when there was John Wayne Gacy (the American serial killer who frequently entertained neighbour-hood children dressed as a clown). He left a kind of a mark on a lot of people, including me, of how bad clowns can really be. So Bingo defi nitely hit a nerve there. Some beautiful ugly clowns came out of that whole memory and mishmash and stuff , and made its way into an environment that I’m very proud of. Th at environment was a very collaborative one, with this guy named Ian Hayden.”
Bingo, however, is more than just a surreal visual farce.
Landreth’s own starting point for the fi lm was the famous line by Joseph Goebbels: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” Even though the
man knows the truth — he is not Bingo — after enough bullying and repetition, he forsakes his identity for that of the clown. On one hand, the quote is an obvious criticism of how the media and politicians mislead and manipulate the general population, yet it also shows us just how fragile we are in our skins. Rather than fi ght, the man takes the easy road. It’s easier to just accept that he’s Bingo than to fi ght for his true beliefs. Sadly, that’s a reality that many of us know intimately.
And how did the theater director feel about Landreth’s inter-pretation? “Th ey were stunned,” Landreth recalls. “I’m not sure what they made of it. I think he had a strong feeling of revulsion about it, but I’m okay with that.”
Landreth spent a year and a half working on Bingo and says that it would have gone a lot quicker if the new software (Maya) didn’t keep breaking down. “It was also extremely diffi cult to get support for it,” adds Landreth.
“It’s a software company and when they’re in the throes of trying to write software by a deadline, could care less about this weird fi lm that this guy is working on. But eventually I got it. And the fi lm was released, actually, on the very same date that the software, Maya, was released.”
Bingo would turn out to be Landreth’s final work for
Alias|Wavefront (Alias Research merged with Wavefront in 1995). “After I did Bingo and Maya was now the established piece of software, there was really no reason, as far as Alias was concerned for 6- minute- long fi lms to be done. And I would have to agree with them from a business sense. Th ere wasn’t a need for that anymore. So I left in March of 2000.”
job with Nelvana (Toronto- based studio and one of the largest producers of children’s television in the world) as the head of 3- D development. “I was taking directions from directors who wanted to develop 3D- stuff ,” says Landreth. “And I would oversee mak-ing these pilot short fi lms for them. So I made two pilot short fi lms. One was Puff the Magic Dragon, which no one will ever see — actually, they won’t see both.”
Th ings didn’t pan out at Nelvana and he left the studio at the end of 2000; however, earlier that year, Landreth had an experi-ence that would prove to change the course of his career and lead to the creation of one of most acclaimed animation fi lms ever made.
Th is is where I momentarily enter the story: I invited Landreth to be on the selection committee of the Ottawa International Animation Festival along with three other animators. At the last minute, one of the people dropped out and I replaced him with an animator I had met in Montreal a few weeks earlier named Ryan Larkin. In the late sixties/early seventies, Larkin was one of the masters of animation. His Academy Award- nominated fi lm,
Walking, was considered one of the great works of animation.
Sadly, his life took a tumble because of drugs, alcohol and mental health issues, and by the time I met him in June 2000, he was living in a Montreal mission and panhandling on the streets. After driving to Montreal to meet Ryan, I had thought it would be interesting to invite Ryan to our festival in September; however, when the opportunity arose, I thought it might be interesting to have Ryan be on the actual committee. I picked Ryan up in Montreal and brought him to Ottawa in July 2000.
It was basically three of us, being the animation professionals, judging these fi lms, and Ryan was at that point acting very much like a person who had not been around animation at all; very much like a bum, actually. He was saying, “I got to have my beer now . . . I’m tired, I got to lay down . . .” He was out of it for the fi rst day or two. Th en something kind of remarkable happened. He came to realize, I think, that he was in the company of people like he had been around when he was a creative person, and he started to really come alive, and we got to see him being lucid and engaged and very impassioned. Th at transformation of the personality was a very striking thing.
Th en the last day, we showed each other our fi lms. Ryan was the last, and he showed Walking (1969) and Street Musique (1972) and another fi lm called Syrinx (1965). We had seen the fi lm Walking before, but now we were really looking at it. We came to realize that this person was a fl aming genius in his time. We were looking at him today — and, fi rst of all, what a change, what an incredible contrast . . . and then, second of all, as Derek [Lamb] in the fi lm says, he’s living out every artist’s worst fear. But if this is where he’s come to, there’s something that’s actually not horrible about that. Th ere’s something very redeeming.
I was immediately inspired to try to get that story into a fi lm. I sat on that for a few months before acting on it. Th en I decided that’s what I wanted to do.
Landreth hooked up with Larkin again during the festival in September 2000. “While we were on the bus over to the [anima-tors’] picnic I asked him, without any real premeditation, it was actually quite impulsive. He was on the bus with me. I said, what
if I made a fi lm about you, based on what I’ve known about you since I met you? He said, ‘Sure.’ But I did nothing about that until February 13, 2001.”
In February Landreth approached Copperheart Entertainment producer Steven Hoban, who he’d worked with briefl y on an IMAX project called Cyberworld 3D. “I remember,” says Landreth. “He produced that, and wanted to include Ryan in that fi lm and re- render it in 3- D — stereoscopic vision. And he was overruled at the time by Brad, the IMAX dude, who said that there’ll be 4- or 5- year- old kids in the audience pissing in their seats if
Ryan was included in that. But we stayed in touch, and he was
completely on board from the very beginning, along with this other guy, Jeremy Edwardes. And a month later, I visited Marcy [Page] at the [National] Film Board. [Th e NFB came on board as co- producers in late 2002.]
During the spring and summer of 2002, Landreth headed to Montreal and spent over 20 hours conducting video and audio interviews with Larkin. Other than knowing that the fi lm had to be Larkin being interviewed, Landreth didn’t really have a specifi c direction at this stage. “Th e idea was vague at fi rst,” he says. “I was thinking along the lines of Nick Park’s Creature Comforts, in which he interviewed people at a zoo in Bristol and then fash-ioned an animated fi lm around the interviews.”
Th en came the turning point: at one point during the inter-views, Landreth brings up Larkin’s alcoholism. Landreth tells Larkin that he saw his own mother die from the disease and that he doesn’t want to see Larkin follow the same path. Larkin, who’d been drinking heavily during the interview and was pretty much obliterated by this point, gets worked up by Landreth’s question
to the point where he explodes in anger. “It’s obviously a big subject in Ryan’s world,” Landreth told VFXWorld magazine, “because he acts so impassioned and angrily toward it. But it is also a big subject in my world, too, and because of that, it brought the interviewer (me) way more into the story than I would have planned beforehand.”
Landreth uses Maya software in the fi lm and does an extraor-dinary job re- creating himself and Ryan (Larkin) as characters. Th e interview between the two takes place in an old, run- down cafeteria that looks like the waiting room for hell: an assortment of disfi gured and literally broken characters occupy the space. Ryan’s appearance is initially horrifying: Landreth has re- created him as a fragile, incomplete person — we see the remains of what was once a face, and much of Ryan’s body is twisted, busted or just not there.
As Ryan refl ects on his life, Landreth uses animation to create spaces and give psychological depth to the characters that simply would not be possible in live- action. In one poignant scene — and there are many, including the moment when Landreth pulls out original drawings from Walking and shows them to an emo-tional Larkin — we meet Felicity, Ryan’s old girlfriend. Seeing the two of them speaking “face to face” about what might have been is powerful, heartbreaking stuff . When Ryan places his hand on Felicity’s, I dare you to keep your eyes dry. His memories of their happy times together momentarily turn him into a younger, “complete” Ryan, with hippie threads and long hair, who comes to life in his award- winning fi lm Street Musique. He is fi lled with joy and soon begins dancing with his creations.
found the aforementioned alcohol scene diffi cult to watch — I mean that in a good way. At one point, Landreth (now wearing a halo of sorts) brings up Ryan’s alcoholism; Ryan, the calm, refl ective, scared little boy, is caught off guard. He claims that his beers are all that he has left — he doesn’t want to become a tea drinker. Landreth tells him that he just wants to see him stay alive and return to fi lmmaking. Suddenly Ryan erupts: he stands up and takes on the appearance of a demon with red spikes protruding from his face. Ryan berates everyone and no one for his state: everyone had robbed him, and without money he has nothing. An intimidated Landreth backs off , his halo explodes and he wonders why he prodded Ryan to begin with.
Th e scene is powerful, mature and tense stuff — something you don’t see much of in animation these days. Th e combination of Landreth’s inventive character design and the raw awkwardness that you could only get through a real, unscripted interview gives this scene an intensity that is rare in animation. Ryan off ers no aff ected, grand philosophical musings, no soppy poetic histri-onics. Th is is life with all its dank, dark, dirty warts; this is the story of a real life gone astray. I don’t mean just Ryan’s life either: Landreth is drawn to Ryan because he sees aspects of his own life and family in Ryan.
Ryan is a fi lm about failure. Th ere is no happy ending. Landreth realizes that Larkin will not change and the fi lm ends with Larkin back working the street. But there is a glimmer of hope: Ryan (who died in February 2007) may not have changed, but he seems to trigger change in people who knew him. “In some ways,” says Landreth, “I look at his life, and there’s something very reassuring about it. He’s basically followed Murphy’s Law [if something can
go wrong, it will] as an artist. If you look at his life now — yeah, he’s poor, he’s sort of on the bottom rung of society — but, on the other hand, he has in many ways a very positively structured life. He has a community of dozens of people who, if they don’t know that he is an artist, at least know that he’s a decent guy, and they take care of him. He has a community of people that a lot of us would fi nd enviable.”
Ryan was a massive success on the festival circuit and took
home the Academy Award for Animation Short Film in 2005. Landreth became an instant star in the fi lm world (both the live- action and animation circuits) and was invited to give lectures and discuss the fi lm. He also received off ers to make feature fi lms, but instead, Landreth decided to make a short fi lm called Th e Spine (2009).
“It’s about an extremely dysfunctional marriage,” says Landreth. “It follows the trajectory, over a short period of time, of a marriage between Dan and Mary. It’s going to play tragedy against comedy. It’s going to start off in this kind of darkly comic tone that, say,
Bingo would have. It’s very oppressively absurdist. Dark tone. So,
yeah, I’m going to do this with this fi lm and see how it goes.” Whatever the future holds for Landreth, his reputation is secured as one of the most inspiring, original and provocative animation artists around.
Figure 4.2 JibJab: The Early Years
